Overview

Located in the heart of Washington D.C., the AHA brings together humanists and nontheists of all stripes together toward the cause of progressive social change. We have a base of over 11,000 members and a network of over 100 grassroots organizations. We produce a variety of publications, including our award-winning magazine the Humanist.

With our extensive local and national media contacts, our lobbying and coalition efforts on Capitol Hill and the efforts of our grassroots activists, we ensure that the humanist point of view is represented—in the halls of power, down on Main Street, and everywhere in-between.

Our adjunct organizations defend the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state (AHLC), advance humanist thought in the realm of education (KHEC), delve into the ethical and moral challenges brought about by advances in biotechnology (ABC), provide aid to those most in need (HC), and apply humanism to daily life (HS).Our annual conference draws hundreds of humanists from across the U.S. to hear world-renowned speakers, connect with fellow nontheists and have a say in the future of the organization. We work alongside other national organizations in the community of reason, and also reach out to our progressive allies to work on issues of common concern.

Since our founding in 1941, the AHA has served as the voice of humanism.

Exposing Fundamentalism and
Considering the Humanism Alternative

The Ad Concept:

The American Humanist Association’s Consider Humanism campaign, the largest nontheist advertising campaign in history, is a series of advertisements that feature two “sections”—one devoted to quotes from religious texts, the other to humanist principles.

There are millions of Americans of strong moral character who don’t happen to believe in a god. Humanists have always understood that you don’t need a god to be a good person, but many other Americans have not, and that’s one reason we’ve been running ad campaigns in the past. This year, we’re going further in our attempt to challenge the intolerant view that atheist and agnostic humanists can’t be good without Bible derived morality. We’re taking a hard look at what is included in religious texts.

The first section of each ad displays one of several quotes from the New International Version Bible and a Qur’anic quote as well. A description accompanies each quote, naming the source of the quote. This section includes large-font text that reads, “What some believe.” The second section features contrasting quotes from humanist documents. These have been pulled from Humanism and Its Aspirations and from nontheist luminaries such as Katharine Hepburn and Richard Dawkins. This section includes large-font text that reads, “What humanists think” and “Consider Humanism.”

The Stiefel Freethought Foundation gave a generous $150,000 toward this campaign. A number of members of the American Humanist Association donated within the last month to help the campaign top the $200,000 mark. Please consider helping the campaign continue and expand.

The Outlets:

The ads will be featured in major newspapers such as USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Village Voice, the Durham Herald Sun, the Arizona Republic and the Independent Triangle, and magazines such as the Progressive and Reason. The ads will also appear on buses and phone booths across Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, inside the Washington DC metro and bus system, on billboards in Moscow, Idaho and Philadelphia, PA, as well websites such as the Friendly Atheist. Consider Humanism TV commercials will appear nationwide on NBC’s Dateline, and stations such as MSNBC, CNBC and Bloomberg Business Television.

Press Release:

Humanists Launch Largest National Advertising Campaign Critical of Religious Scripture

Press Conference, National Press Club, November 9, 2010.
Speeches by: Roy Speckhardt, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association; Todd Stiefel, Member of the American Humanist Association Advisory Board and President of the Todd Stiefel Foundation; and Sara Ameigh, Communications and Policy Assistant for the American Humanist Association.[ Read all speeches here ]

(Washington, D.C., November 9, 2010) A national multimedia ad campaign – the largest, most extensive ever by a godless organization – launches today and will include a spot on NBC Dateline on Friday, November 12, as well as other television ads, that directly challenge biblical morality and fundamentalist Christianity. The campaign, sponsored by the American Humanist Association, also features ads in major national and regional newspapers and magazines demonstrating that secular humanist values are consistent with mainstream America and that fundamentalist religion has no right to claim the moral high ground.

The ads juxtapose notable humanist quotes with passages from religious texts, including the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran. The ads then ask the audience to “Consider Humanism.” One example is the following pairing: The Bible: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” I Timothy 2 (New International Version) Humanism: “The rights of men and women should be equal and sacred—marriage should be a perfect partnership.” Robert G. Ingersoll, in a letter dated April 13, 1878. Another pairing is: The Bible: “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” God, Hosea 13:16 (New International Version) Humanism: “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.” Albert Einstein, column for The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930.

By the NumbersThe nonreligious may be America’s largest
minority

by Tom Flynn

Believers and nonbelievers in religion don’t agree about much. Sadly, one
thing the devout and the debunkers do seem to agree on is that unbelief occupies
an increasingly marginal position in American life. Each day secular humanists,
atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers feel more firmly on the outside,
looking in through thicker, murkier windows. In the worlds of politics and the
media, public displays of piety that would have raised hackles two decades ago
are now the norm. Through-out American life, expectations that one will affirm
the supernatural, or at least the spiritual, grow more explicit. Even seasoned
humanist activists feel tempted to say, “What can we do? We’re too small a group
to make a difference, too small even to defend ourselves effectively against a
whole society determined to re-adopt the sacred.”

Don’t believe it!

First, it isn’t true that the whole of American society has embarked on a
mission to re-adopt the sacred. That is rather the agenda of well-funded,
well-organized minorities on the Right-admittedly, minorities who have done a
superb job of raising money and playing the games of special interest politics.
We should be concerned about their successes, but we needn’t fear that they’ll
turn every American into a fundamentalist bigot. For instance, much has been
made of the August Gallup poll showing that fewer Americans would vote for an
atheist presidential candidate than for a woman, a Jew, an African American, or
a homosexual. What’s forgotten is that 49% of respondents said they would vote
for an atheist candidate-and that number is the highest it’s been since Gallup
started tracking that question in the 1950s.1

The second reason not to despair is simple: there are a hell of a lot more of
us out there than many activists think. In 1993 Williamson estimated the total
population belonging to atheist or humanist organizations or subscribing to the
movement’s publications at 178,000.2 As
minorities go, that’s vanishingly small. And if you listen to the Religious
Right, it’s about what you’d expect: a trifling fringe of village-atheist
misfits whose concerns are hopelessly remote from the American mainstream.

But perhaps counting membership cards isn’t the best way to gauge the size of
our movement. If we take the whole spectrum of nonbelievers, from hard-bitten
atheists to those self-described “religious humanists” who nonetheless hold no
transcendental beliefs—the population that a coalition of humanist and atheist
groups recently dubbed “the Community of Reason”—how many Americans might we be
talking about?

In 1995, Free Inquiry decided to find out. Suspicious that Gallup and other
pollsters under-reported unbelievers, we hired a national polling organization
to conduct our own telephone survey. We labored over the questions to remove
pro-religious spin. For example, in 1976 Gallup started asking not whether
respondents believed in God, but whether they believed in God or a universal
spirit-a good way to keep the number of reported believers stable even as their
notions of God grew more diverse.3 In contrast, the
FI poll’s principal “God question” was designed to count only believers in a
traditional anthropomorphic deity and to exclude deists, pantheists, and those
who view God as an impersonal spirit. On this question 88.6% of our respondents
said they believed in a personal God who answers prayers.4 Sure enough, instead of Gallup’s stereotypical finding
that 95% of Americans believe in God, our poll identified 11.4% who don’t
believe in the classical idea of God.

A 1999 Scripps-Howard study using different methodology replicated that
number almost exactly. Scripps Howard News Service and the Ohio University E.W.
Scripps School of Journalism analyzed seven national public opinion polls
conducted in the late 1990s by O.U.’s Scripps Survey Research Center.
Respondents were asked to choose their religious preference from a list of
sects. “None” was not a menu item; nonreligious respondents had to volunteer
that response. Despite that obstacle, 11.24% reported no religious preference.
Scripps’s own summary said it plainly: the nonreligious must now be considered
the second-largest single belief group in America, second only to Roman
Catholics.5

From this I conclude that the Community of Reason is significantly larger
than most people-even many humanist activists-previously thought. If Free
Inquiry’s numbers are correct and 11.4% of Americans do not believe in a god who
answers prayers-if the Scripps numbers are correct and 11.24% of Americans will
go out of their way to deny any religious preference-then something between
30,996,687 and 31,437,921 Americans belong in our camp.6 That’s roughly as many
Community of Reason members as there are African Americans . . . a few more
Reasoners than the estimated gay and lesbian population . . . roughly five times
as many nonbelievers as American Jews . . . ten times as many nonbelievers as
religiously active American Jews!

How marginal are we, then? Can 30 or 31 million people form only a blip on
the cultural radar scope that’s too small to keep in focus? I’d suggest that
numbers like that give us all the bodies we need to defend the civil rights of
the nonreligious and carve out a place of respect for secular humanism in an
increasingly diverse America. Our challenge is to recruit a larger fraction of
that vast population into the Council for Secular Humanism and indeed into all
of the nation’s atheist, freethinker, secular humanist, and humanist
organizations. We need to learn from our better-organized opponents on the
Religious Right, in the gay and lesbian movement, and elsewhere. Unbelievers
need ways to act-and organize-that take advantage of the social leverage our
real numbers represent.

Copyright notice: The copyright for the contents
of this web site rests with the Council for Secular Humanism.
You may
download and read the documents. Without permission, you may not alter this
information, repost it, or sell it.
If you use a document, you are
encouraged to make a donation to the Council
for Secular
Humanism.